MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
Outbreak movies and TV shows take on the topic of how a viral outbreak spreads before being eventually contained or neutralized. Netflix and even my cable movie cue is now suggesting that I watch these movies while I am being asked to shelter in place.
Alarmingly, outbreak narratives are even used as how-to manuals, of sorts. In 1998, President Bill Clinton passed “The Cobra Event,” Richard Preston’s fictional account of bioterrorist attacks on American soil, to Defense Secretary William Cohen and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala referenced the book in her article “Bioterrorism: How Prepared Are We?” for the Centers for Disease Control’s “Emerging Infectious Diseases” journal.
A couple days ago, journalist Mike Stuchbery claimed that some U.K. and U.S. crisis response teams are reading “World War Z” by Max Brooks as a study in the social effects of epidemics. The novel is a fictional account of a zombie plague that wipes out almost all of the world’s population.
However, as I was perusing my menu of contagious movies I saw 12 Monkeys and thought that I could binge the TV show or watch the movie. I remember that there was also a time travel element in the movie and TV show and so I thought what the heck – it may be inspiring.
Needless to say it was – not only was it topical it had me thinking about the glitchiness of the matrix or the reality we are living through now.
If you missed it the first time around, thereundefineds no better time to catch up on the late-2010s SYFY series 12 Monkeys. Like, literally. With the world effectively on hiatus for the next few weeks due to concerns over the coronavirus, thereundefineds a certain comfort in looking back at pandemic stories where things work out in the end. A world where heroes step into the void to save the day. A world where we win.
Sure, 12 Monkeys actually needed a time machine to get ahead of the world-ending pandemic, but it checks the boxes. The series in on Hulu right now.
You may even want to watch the 1995 movie that was directed by Terry Gilliam where a man is sent back in time to stop a pandemic.
This film of course was in my que on my cable TV along with Contagion and World War Z. I thought it would be fun to watch a time travel pandemic film –rather than watching ugly reality films.
But then again every news report on TV lately looks like something from “Fear the Walking Dead.”
There is even a trending hashtag on Twitter called the coronapocalypse.undefined At first, I thought it was Chronoapocalypse and for some reason I was inspired to look into the possibility of a timely or a temporal apocalypse complete with plague.
The result is 12 Monkeys.
It is hap hazard connection I know but certain things trigger my imagination when I am asked to stay home and make the best of this massive hysteria over the coronavirus.
One of the things contributing to skepticism concerning the potential for time travel is the fact that itundefineds actually a complex science for which the most accurate information is not widely known, linked to time travel, nor distributed. Instead, thereundefineds massive amounts of misinformation derived mostly from attempts to apply logic to inaccurate speculations based on concepts which serve as the basis for sci-fi plot lines, even within the physics community - as if they had any relevance beyond pure fantasy.
Time travel is most certainly a popular trope in science fiction that certainly blows the mind whenever it is illustrated correctly, however, the quantum solution time and time travel can be abused incessantly by writers and dreamers who don’t care about sound science – in other words, why let the reality get in the way of a good story.
One of the films that I am looking forward to is the movie, Tenet. It is directed by Christopher Nolan and if you have seen the preview you realize that there is more than meets the eye.
The agents in the film’s trailer seem to have a key to open the doors to the multiverse because an unknown agent speaks to another saying that “You have to look at the world in a new way.” We then notice that everything that is seen, seems to roll in reverse and then corrects itself as thought someone has been very observant of glitches in the timeline that are correcting themselves to avoid a paradox.
What we don’t know from the film’s trailer is whether or not these agents are acausal in physical location, a metaphysical realm, or perhaps causal beings that can manipulate timelines.
One of the agents is told that their job is to prevent World War III – he asks “you mean the nuclear holocaust” and the reply is “No something much worse.”
It appears that many scenes in the trailer shows a bit of reverse cosmology – the expanse of the universe and then a contraction pulling everything in reverse.
In his celebrated book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking posited that if the universe were to cease its expansion and start to contract instead, that the arrow of time would flip and things would happen in reverse, including people knowing what the stock market numbers were because they had already happened. Broken tea cups on the floor would reassemble and return to the table top.
Conversely, if everything is happening in reverse, thoughts, light, motion, and yes, even bodily functions would be happening in reverse as well. But if thatundefineds true, not only would people not know about the stock market numbers, they wouldnundefinedt know anything Thatundefineds right. If Hawking were correct, all life would stop at the moment of reversal because everything that had happened already would be the only thing happening let alone in reverse.
Tenet is also a palindrome for the number ten, where one is forward as the other is the obverse – the decimation of time or how something escapes, irretrievable time.
We have spoken before about how there may or may not be a deterioration or a glitch in the matrix and that one or two glitches may be correcting themselves with déjà vu or synchronicity but there is also that other theory that something unstable like the Higgs-Boson is creating an effect where we are unaware that the multiverse is decaying and along with it our reality.
Stephen Hawking once predicted that discovering the Higgs had the potential to destroy the universe, or in his own words, cause the universe to “undergo a catastrophic vacuum decay.”
Scientists at CERN discovered the God Particle On July 4th, 2012 and as far as we know the world is still intact but since the discovery, the planet has gone through some violent changes as earthquakes have increased, volcanic eruptions have also increased, the planet has suffered climate spikes, and the magnetic field is weakening.
Two years ago there was a report about how there were some scientists that were worried that perhaps the Higgs-Boson was never stable and that the end of the universe could, theoretically, have already begun.
Physicists at Harvard published a study in the journal Physical Review D about the chance that the particle would destabilize and how long our universe has to live, based on the speed of destruction and the size of the universe.
If the Higgs-Boson lost stability, it would severely disrupt physics, chemistry, and life. However, the universe is big enough that the disruption might not destroy Earth for a long time.
However, the earth would show signs that it was thrust into a new environment even on a quantum level.
The result would be the weakening of the magnetic field, an abrupt pole shift, devastating earthquakes in places not prone to quakes, weather disruptions, and an increase in volcanic eruptions.
There are even greater risks of new diseases being released as disrupted frequencies bring back or resurrect diseases and apex predators that we once thought were extinct.
As we are thrust into a paradigm we do not feel it – but the earth will and thus there will be an effect so disruptive it would look like World War III.
Theoretically a spontaneous hole in the fabric of reality could end the universe.
This is called “spacetime decay” and believe it or not scientists are looking into the possibility that the universe might be on track to eat itself from the inside out.
Of course scientists want to stress that this is highly unlikely but are putting their energies towards monitoring the possibility of being swallowed up by a time bubble where one bubble in the multiverse collides with ours.
The idea that in specific scenarios the universe would be entirely destroyed by an expanding bubble of nothing has been around since 1982, when theoretical physicist Edward Witten introduced the possibility of the universe eating itself in a paper in Nuclear Physics B journal. He wrote: “A hole spontaneously forms in space and rapidly expands to infinity, pushing to infinity anything it may meet.”
Given that a bubble of nothing has not in fact destroyed the universe, neither in the 13 billion years before Witten published his paper nor in the 38 years since, it would be reasonable for physicists to push it down the research priority list. But three physicists at the University of Oviedo in Spain and the University of Uppsala in Sweden argue that we can learn important lessons from an all-consuming, universe-destroying bubble in a wonderfully titled paper, “Nothing Really Matters”, submitted to the Journal of High-Energy Physics this month.
In particular, understanding the conditions for spacetime decay through a bubble of nothing is a step towards connecting the best theories about the tiniest building blocks of the universe—strings—with theories about space and time itself.
Since most of our universe is a vacuum and already in the lowest possible energy state, we shouldn’t have to worry about spacetime decay. In theoretical physics, however, assumptions like that are rarely stable themselves.
Although the new concept of a false vacuum was suggested to describe only a transition period before the Big Bang,undefinedmore recent researchundefinedinto the Higgs Field suggests we might still be living in a false vacuum after all, since what was previously thought to be the stable (lowest energy) state of a Higgs field might not be the lowest energy state.
The possibility that the stability of our universe is a very long illusion has opened up looming questions about how and why the delicate false vacuum might decay. One answer is through a undefinedbubble of nothing.undefined
If a bubble of nothing spontaneously forms in false-vacuum spacetime, it will grow and eventually swallow the entire universe.undefined A bubble of nothing describes a possible channel for undefineduniverse destruction;undefined in that the bubble of nothing expands and can undefinedeatundefined all of spacetime, converting it into “nothing.”
But why would a bubble of nothing form in the first place? The answer lies in string theory, a popular and successful candidate for a “theory of everything” which postulates tiny entities called strings with properties that other fundamental particles don’t have. In particular, strings have a vibrational state which accounts for quantum gravity. In other words, the theory integrates phenomena in quantum physics with the behavior and effects of gravitational fields. This result is much-sought after, and is a significant reason why string theory is so popular.
Recently, physicists filmed a quantum measurement but the ‘moment’ was blurry.undefined
The team set out to discover if the “ideal quantum measurement” exists in nature. One of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics involves the concept of “superposition.” This idea basicallyundefinedsays that things in the quantum world can be in more than one place at the same time.
In this experiment, the researchers trapped an atom and attempted to measure an electron in superposition. The big idea here was that the electron’s atomic orbit can take more than one trajectory (high or low) and, through superposition, it can exist in both trajectories at the same time.
Under normal circumstances, the very act of measuring an object in superposition causes it to “collapse” into one state or another. This, theoretically, makes it near-impossible for someone to “hack” a quantum network undetected. But physicists have long dreamed of the “ideal quantum measurement.”
Such a measurement would allow scientists to get a clear view of what occurs during the collapse from superposition to classical reality (what exists before we measure versus the end-result we actually observe). And, more importantly, it would make it possible to study quantum states without forcing the violent collapse: the goal of ideal quantum measurement is to maintain superposition after observation.
What they found was something in-between classic collapse and ideal quantum measurements.undefined
While the film itself is a breakthrough that will almost certainly further our understanding of the quantum universe, the researchers are applying their work to the development of a quantum computer based on measuring trapped ions – the experiment revealed a tiny morsel of information about the nature of time itself.
According to the research, the collapse from superposition to ultimate state is not instantaneous. The press release described it as occurring “gradually under the influence of the measurement.” As this represents what might be our closest, most-detailed observation of a quantum function unfolding, it stands to reason that it’s our clearest view yet of how time works in the quantum universe.
This is important because time is a sort ofundefinedbedrockundefinedthread tying the classical and quantum universes together. By-and-large the scientific community treats “time” as an external background parameter, meaning it should work the same way in the quantum world as it does in the one we naturally observe.
Yet the results of the European team’s experiment appear to confirm what Einstein’s Relativity has shown us all along: time may be a malleable, physical property of the universe.
The classical and quantum worlds should be a clear case of “as above, so below.” If that’s true, then perhaps the term ‘exact moment’ would not be fundamentally supported in nature – there are many moments simultaneously happening in nature simultaneously happening in time.
The world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, contains a host of experiments that seek to answer the unanswered questions about the nature of the universe.
Mostly, these experiments have ruled out theories describing various exotic particles to explain dark matter. But one of the experiments, called LHCb, has discovered a small deviation between what they’ve measured and what’s predicted by the core theory of particle physics, called the Standard Model. After three years of data analysis, the discrepancy remains—a potential sign of new physics.
Particle accelerators hunt for new particles essentially by using the E=mc2 equation (which essentially that says energy and mass are equivalent): They accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light and smash them together inside of detectors, where the released energy turns into particles not often seen on Earth. This is how physicists discovered the Higgs boson, for example. But as this direct production method fails to yield new particles, other experiments are looking for hints of new physics indirectly—such as by observing how particles decay into other particles.
CERN has literally triggered a whole new way of looking at physics – the only way to sum things up is that it is weird. What CERN won’t divulge is if it is weird in a good way or a bad way.
The universe is a quantum object – mankind is tinkering with a well tuned quantum object.undefined As a quantum object, the universe must interact with something and that something is probably other universes.
Maybe we do live in a computer simulation after all. But instead of being some advanced creature’s favorite non player character we’re just bits of math that help the operating system run.undefined If there is a non sequitur are we able to correct the problem before we are consumed in a bubble of nothing?
Are we seeing evidence of a universe eating itself?
With the increase of paranormal activity, things like the Mandela Effect, ghost sightings among other things we may be seeing a bleed through from the multiverse reminding us that there is more to the universe in duplicate.
The studies of paranormal activity and the parallel universe studies are overlapping now.
The day is not far when those aspects of the paranormal that are grounded in the physics of parallel universes.
The physics behind viable solutions are centered around quantum mechanics and information theory, surrounded by a number of applicable areas of study and research.
The truth is that there’s much we simply don’t understand about our reality, and apart from science fiction movies about time travel and the weird New Science that is now being touted by thise who conduct experiments at CERN, there is the possibility that maybe there is a backup matrix which has been constructed where we are all playing a role in a huge electromagnetic encyclopedia that is being watched by sympathetic aliens, or scientists or even God.
The idea of simulation point is based on the concept of quantum indeterminacy, which is the idea that a particle is in one of the multiple states and you don’t know that unless you observe the particle.
Probably a better way to understand it is the now-infamous example of Schrödinger’s Cat, which is a cat that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger theorized would be in a box with some radioactive material and there was a 50 percent chance the cat is dead and a 50 percent chance the cat is alive.
Now, common sense would tell us that the cat is already either alive or it’s dead. We just don’t know because we haven’t looked in the box. We open the box and it’ll be revealed to us whether the cat is alive or dead. But quantum physics tells us that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until somebody opens up the box to observe it. The cardinal rule is the universe renders only that which needs to be observed.
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